I make snapshots every hour for 24 hours, every day for 7 days, every week for 4 weeks and every month for three months. This keeps the number of snapshots reasonable while keeping most stuff around should you accidentally delete or overwrite it. I can see a good argument for more fine grained snapshots (e.g. every few minutes) but I think I'd limit that to directories (and thus FSes) known to have frequent updates.<p>I sometimes blow away all snapshots if I have a big clear out or rewrite of data, or else that stuff sticks around for months.
'In this article, we’ll learn how ZFS boot environments (BEs) are used to boot the operating system itself into a previous point in time.'<p>The whole article does not touch the subject of boot environments ...<p>Maybe the author can update the page and state that the article is about managing snapshots instead of boot environments?
Can you somehow associate snapshots from separate machines? Lets say I have two servers that provide services for an app, one runs a postgresql db and the other is just a front for a directory that stores attachments (it's an example ok). Both servers are running ZFS and each service is running on its own volume which has regular snapshots taken. If I'm not too worried about the snapshots being in <i>perfect</i> sync (its ok if I have an extra attachment or have to pull an attachment from the next snapshot; I'm not asking for a solution to the distributed consensus problem here), is there some particular way I should store or manage the snapshots? Or do I need to write some custom scripts to associate the snapshots and restore them together in case of a recovery situation?
If you're using a recent Ubuntu, docker/zfs can lead to a large amount of snapshots. 'docker system prune' may help but has had zfs issues for me.
I tuned out of ZFS when it was being designed, ducked my head in a few years later to read about 8GB+ RAM requirements, and have not tuned back in properly (don’t kick me off HN lol)<p>My question is on snapshots vs file-specific backups: If a folder is set up for non-destructive writes, does it then <i>need</i> snapshots? Is there a benefit to using both snapshots and NDR in the field?
I orchestrate ZFS snapshots using Monit and Syncoid.<p>See: <a href="https://serverfault.com/a/842740/13325" rel="nofollow">https://serverfault.com/a/842740/13325</a>